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Today I want to talk about why it matters if you know what's going on in the world and why so many people don't know these days. I don't know any of the details of that yet. Last week, a report from the Roosevelt Institute on the state of US Journalism was released. I just heard about that. Literally, I was walking in. I'll discuss the report itself more later, but for now, I'll just give you the first sentence of its conclusion. I don't know all the details of all the individual allegations. The crisis facing American journalism and democr democracy is the predictable outcome of policy choices that have prioritized corporate profits over democratic needs. I try not to react to what Marjorie Taylor Greene says every day. In my opinion, the collapse of journalism is in this moment, part of a larger trend in which institutions are being annihilated. Transgender operas in Colombia, drag shows in Ecuador. It is in some ways an accidental byproduct of democracy, destroying mechanisms that were unleashed a while ago. And more recently, the collapse's acceleration is a result of deliberate sabotage. Just by way of quick review, because I'm an amateur historian, you'll understand. I don't think that anything approximating democracy. The White House has been renovated many times over the years, you understand, can happen without some sustainable form of a free press. I've said to you all very plainly in good faith, we're not. We don't have a political strategy here. So for today's episode, I want to talk about how governments have destroyed journalism and other institutions in the past, the ways that it's been resisted, and what we might do to salvage the most important aspects of a free press and to save ourselves. I don't have a strategy.
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A whole host of institutions are under relentless attack in the US Right now. I think this is a defining moment for public health in this country. In some cases, it's been an ongoing battle. It is for the first time that we can no longer count on our federal agencies to provide us scientifically sound information. In other cases, the fight is newer. The Trump administration announced the dismantling of parts of the Education Department. But the people who have long fought to ruin public K12 schools are now in power. Former Education secretary under TRUMP Betsy DeVos joins me now. Madam Secretary, the plan is to send the money directly to the states. When that happens, is that a big setback for the teachers union? Well, Stuart, it's a great step. Universities are being dismantled even in cases where departments bring in more money than they cost, as happened recently in Nebraska. Going from A Department of Statistics to a distributed mile is like going from having a heart transplant done at Nebraska Medicine to now having it done at a CVS Minute clinic. The postal system has been threatened repeatedly by the President and now Amazon is looking at creating its own delivery network to rival the U.S. postal system. So the big question is, can Amazon really break up with the post office? Well, the answer, on paper at least, is yes. After years of instability exacerbated by consolidating medical and hospital industry actors, hospitals and clinics are facing looming massive cuts in social programs. Already nearly 100 rural hospitals have closed or eliminated inpatient services in the last decade, threatening health care access to some of the more than 16 million people living in rural communities who rely on Medicaid. Even the most sympathetic form of capitalism, small business owners are under attack because they can't afford the tariff hikes. Massive job losses this fall are happening primarily in small businesses, revealing the consolidation of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people in the country that actually disproportionately affects red states, by the way. Meanwhile, US government reports and data that taxpayers paid for, reports that were created to be part of the base of public knowledge in the country the are becoming inaccessible. The Department of Agriculture is ending a decades long effort to track food insecurity across the country. The Household Food Security Report is what it's called and it provides yearly data on the lack of access to adequate nutrition for low income Americans. Knowledge and information across the board are facing dire threats. Our commentary is from former New York Times columnist Charles Blow on a disappearing staple of communities everywhere.
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Local news is in crisis. So journalism isn't alone in being a target, but it is getting hammered. By some estimates, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished since 2005. The list of ways that journalism is collapsing and or is under attack right now is a long one. A collapse comparable in scale to the coal industry. The current crisis in journalism goes back decades. On average, two newspapers close each week tapping Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Chris wrote in March about the 80% decline between 1990 and 2025 in journalists working at newspapers. Just to pause over that for a moment. It means that for every five slots at a paper 35 years ago, only one job still exists. Now public radio and public television are also part of the ecosystem of local news. And they too are now under threat. After the government clawed back $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in July of this year, Nieman Lab wrote about a report from Rebuild Local News and Muckrack, which found that more than 1,000 counties, one out of three in the country, no longer even have one full time local journalist on the job. What's worse, expanding atheism in Nepal. A new Pew Research report from just last week suggests that a lot of Americans are checking out altogether. I have been listening again. I was pretty busy yesterday. Didn't follow a lot of the News. As of August 2025, 36% of U.S. adults say they follow the news all or most of the time. That is down from 51% in 2016. So in a single decade, the country has dropped from half the population saying they stay on top of the news to. To just one third. That's not my lane. I don't know. Some of these issues are part of what this new report from the Roosevelt Institute has looked at. As the report's authors describe it, the current crisis is the result of the financial savaging of journalism outlets, often by political or corporate actors that have no interest in the public good. You have to ask the president about that. I'm not sure. In some cases, the political and corporate actors are actually adversarial to the notion of journalism as a public good. Maria Reso won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 as CEO of Rappler in the Philippines after being arrested and convicted by the government in 2019, ostensibly over the outlet's coverage of a businessman. And her new book, how to Stand up to a the Fight for Our Future, offers sage insights for all of us. And Maria Ressa joins us now here in our studio. The charges seemed more related to her coverage of the country's President, Rodrigo Duterte than any legitimate legal matter. I've watched the charges against me go from, you know, 14 investigations in 2017, 10 arrest warrants in 2019, you know, a little bit over. It went from 103 years in prison to just last January, I had four criminal tax evasion charges thrown out. Both Rappler and I were acquitted. It took four years and two months. But that decision actually said, you know, these cases should never even have made it to court. She faced wave after wave of litigation on corporate and tax matters as well. You're coming out of it, but you still face a lifetime in jail. And I actually have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to ask for permission to travel to be here. It's no longer a lifetime. Now we're down to maybe a decade. You're laughing about it. That's progress. It's hardly news that there have been many times in history, when journalism has been attacked, the information warfare that has now become molecular at a democracy, that is targeting individuals in a democracy, every authoritarian regime targets the press directly. The fire that set the kindling on fire is technology. And the after technology platforms took over the distribution of information, of news, we saw.
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An overemphasis on profit at all costs. Sometimes that's by physical attacks directly against reporters. At other times, reprisal comes when leaders try to get journalists fired if they criticize or even report on those in power. We began to see it in 2016.
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I was shocked that it could be used this way. But Russian disinformation, you know, the former KGB chair Yuri Andropov said that disinformatsiya is like cocaine. You take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you become a changed person. We are changed people. And in other cases, wannabe dictators pressure or close whole news outlets. Antipathy toward free speech and reporting is one of the most consistent features of dictatorships. And the enabler for the rise of autocracy is technology, the social media. We are electing these illiberal leaders democratically and they are crushing institutions from within their own countries. But they're not staying in their countries. They're also allying with each other. Turning to Africa, Ed Amin, the dictator who ruled Uganda in the 1970s, intimidated and killed journalists and dissidents alike, all while shaping the Ugandan Broadcasting Corporation into a press agency, fluffing his image and reinforcing his rule. His Excellency, Field Marshal Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC Possessor of Almighty power and knowledge, lord of the clans and the land, the father of all twins, the cook with all the firewood, the lord of the shield and spears, the Queen Termite, the President of the Second Republic of Uganda. In 21st century Russia, one of the most staggering blows to any hypothetical future for democracy in that country has been the slow extinction of independent press and voices that's taken place in the last 13 years. Stark warning tonight from Russian pro democracy leader Garry Kasparov. In the wake of moves by the Trump administration to crack down what it calls hate speech on laws have forced organizations to advertise themselves as foreign agents if they are deemed to have any support from outside the country whatsoever. Quote, Very quickly, the Russian government set about squeezing the country's fledgling free press. They did so in a pincer movement that attacked individual journalists, presenters and programs from one side and the owners of media enterprises from the other. The foreign agent law was put in place in 2012 to silence critics of Vladimir Putin. Dictatorship doesn't arrive, you know, with tanks on the streets. It happens rarely. Things that seem maybe reasonable or could be argued away.
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Just one by one. In the years since, it's been expanded multiple times to limit the presence, reach and even existence of reporting independent of the government. Our website was blocked in Russia, which effectively made us outlaws. In the wake of the launch of all out conventional war on Ukraine in 2022, even vestigial tokens of a free press vanished. And also the Russian parliament on the same day passed a law and on the same day President Putin signed it into effect, which effectively makes our work.
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A criminal offense in the eyes of the Russian law. A criminal offense to say anything that is not in line with the Kremlin's official word. And this crackdown threatening journalists like you with 15 years in prison. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has arrested domestic and international journalists alike, making any reporting on government matters fraught. Many of the Russian government's targets were never actually arrested or charged with any specific offense. Many more were never targeted at all. A few high profile people got shaken down and everyone else got them. Yes, but again, everything happens slowly. More than once, those doing that reporting have paid with their lives. Most famously in the case of of Anna Politikovskaya, who was assassinated in 2006. It's a bitter pill to swallow for the family and colleagues of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, one of the men convicted in her killing. Former policeman Sergei Hadzi Korbanov received a presidential pardon following his military service in Ukraine.
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Assassination of journalists remains off the table at this point. In the US Though, Trump has ignored or condoned such violence overseas, as happened with Jamal Khashoggi. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that. You don't have to embarrass our guests by asking a question like that. Nevertheless, we see an escalating war as the administration attempts to silence and intimidate the press. And by the way, Trump is kind of a genius, you know, to normalize things that were absolutely abnormal. The White House has launched a media bias portal as the latest strike in its ongoing war against any criticism of it. The Pentagon press corps has been reduced to a clown car of journalistic coverage. Will the President consider giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to big balls? Trump has long threatened to personally sue or has brought actual nonsense suits against outlet after outlet. In the latest case, he's opposing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for publishing a story about his friendship with child sex offender and sex traffick, trafficker of underage girls, Jeffrey Epstein. Now that he has a subservient Department of Justice that he's been using to Cal networks and media companies, he is also rewarding those who will muzzle themselves. I think any deal should, it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately. But I don't think the people that are running that company right now and running cnn, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don't think that should be allowed to continue. It's an American tradition for presidents to loathe the press. And even some of your favorite presidents have been bad actors on this front, limiting access and avoiding transparency when it was convenient for them. We're joined by Jeremy Scahill. His latest piece in the Nation is called why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen? But under Trump, those attacks have become open season on insulting individual journalists and threatening the existence of their employers.
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And Collins, quote, stupid and nasty. On November 27, he said, Are you stupid? To CBS journalist Nancy Cortez. On November 26, he called the New York Times Katie Rogers, quote, ugly. On November 18, he called ABC's Mary Bruce terrible and insubordinate. To whom I'm not sure. These attacks function in at least three ways. You released video of that first boat strike on September 2, but not the second video. Will you release video of that strike so that the American people can see for themselves whatever? I don't know what they have, but whatever they have would certainly release no problem. First, they silence individuals who are publicly questioning what the authoritarian is doing. Mr. President, you said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegstad now says you said that. I didn't say that. This is ABC fake news aiming to erase any possibility of criticism in the public sector. He now says it's under review. Are you ordering the secretary to release that full video? Whatever he decides is okay with me. Are you committing to releasing the full video? Didn't I just tell you that? You said that it was up to Secretary obnoxious reporter in the whole place. Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious, a terrible. Actually a terrible reporter. And it's always the same thing with you and any threat to the power of the small cadre of people actually running the country. I Told you. Whatever Pete Hegseth wants to do is okay with me. Secondly, attacks on journalism expand the opportunity for corruption from mundane scandals to massive ones. The founder of the crypto exchange Binance, a man named Changpeng Zhao, also known simply as Czech, is one of the latest recipients of a controversial presidential pardon. Why did you pardon him? Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. Thirdly, assaults on the press fragment any common understanding of what is going on. A 2018 MIT study said that lies spread six times faster than facts on social media. You know, you add fear, anger, hate, and you will spread even faster. That's the incentive structure. So the incentive structure is upside down. The new gatekeepers have said, lie, I'll reward you. Keep lying, I'll keep rewarding you. Trump and his allies aren't just destroying our common understanding of what's happening today. However, they're trying to eliminate any framework that might later be able to establish a reality other than the one that Trump chooses. They always have a hoax. The new word is affordability.
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This issue is even, and maybe especially a question of what matters enough for people to pay attention to it. With a healthy journalistic sector, monitoring is always happening in the current one. It's not on every level, but especially at the local level. What were you hearing from the community about this shrinkage of coverage? If anything, people missed depth decades ago. Of course, not everyone would read a newspaper story about a city council meeting. But if something went wrong, if coverage revealed news or a scandal related to that meeting, people knew where to look for the story and they had a trusted source to outline the issue or crisis for them. The best word comes from reporting on the places you live, the people you see every single day. If they needed to know something, it was understood they could often find a story about it in their local paper and get the details there. They had outsourced some of their social monitoring and faith in democracy to journalists. The focus of these outlets was not only on Big J journalism, the fourth estate's mission to hold power to account. It was also on small J wedding announcements and obituaries, profiles of valedictorians and roundups of high school games. This connective tissue of local news strengthens communities and makes them whole. Now, the truth is that in many cases, the system of US journalism didn't fulfill this role as well as it should have. The interests and welfare of whole communities were often ignored and underrepresented or worse, misrepresented. Even in the best eras and the best examples, the news in this country has tended to tilt toward reinforcing the status quo and giving corporate interests and the extremely wealthy good faith readings of their actions that were frequently not accurate and didn't meet the self declared principles of journalism. So if the existing system wasn't always fair or just, and there's plenty of room for criticism of how it functioned in ways it could have and still might improve. But the answer is not to have less journalism, to spend less time monitoring the powerful, or to reduce freedom of speech in the United States. In fact, all those things are incredibly dangerous to democracy and to individual Americans.
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The Roosevelt Institute, which published the report on the state of US Journalism last week, is, among other things, a nonprofit think tank affiliated with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Except for Theodore Roosevelt, most presidents before him had treated report as little better than spies. FDR called them by their first names, claimed to be a newspaper man himself because he'd once edited the Harvard Crimson and provided a constant flow of copy that kept him always at the center of events. The report's authors are Bilal Bedoun, Shahrzad's Shams and Victor Picard. They suggest that the public interest obligations of journalism have been ignored along with the competitive markets and independent journalism that democracy requires. My name is Jason Stanley. I'm the author of five books, most recently How Fascism Works, the Politics of Us and Them. Media institutions have been made vulnerable to capture in ways that leave them unable to withstand authoritarian pressure from government. The center of democracy is truth. You're not free if you've been lied to. But they argue that these failures have opened the possibility for new models that integrate journalism into basic democratic infrastructure, treating it as a public good rather than a business commodity. Political equality means speaking truth to power. If someone really powerful is humiliated when they're caught lying, that's the core of political equality. Building the media that democracy needs to thrive will require a range of policy interventions, they say, including breaking up media conglomerates, making public investments toward local journalism and a robust public media system, and reining in big tech firms. Fixing the crisis of journalism is not going to be an arena in which we can just band aid our way to a healthy society. There are going to have to be big national initiatives targeting the problem in order to revive the field. But there's still a lot you can do to triage the current damage. Particularly close to home. I firmly believe we have the bones of a functional journalism system that could be used to spark something better. Support big outlets that are taking chances and doing good reporting. I've been particularly impressed with Wired, Philly Inquirer, and Boston Globe of late. You can support independent outlets and journalists too. I mention specific ones in these episodes week after week. They're doing some of the most exciting and critical reporting around the country right now. Marisa Kaba has put together a list of several good ones over at the Hand Basket, but you can find additional ones close to home that aren't even on that list that you can also support. That includes local public radio. It might seem harmless and anodyne sometimes when you hear a segment on something that doesn't matter to you, but local radio often provides tremendous public service when it comes to information and independent reporting. If there's an issue near you that they're not covering that they should be, tell them. They're often really motivated to respond to their audience. You can also find and share outlets that are trying to address the damage being done to agencies that used to play a key role in informing the public. The Evidence Collective, for instance. Fact checks government statements as well as meetings, hearings and reports about public health. Expert voices can keep you informed on what an agency is really up to. And you can do the same kind of project locally, even if you're not experts. Set up a committee of people that will go and report on what happens at city council meetings or the Board of education meetings or similar meetings at the library if your group is one that can't get people to attend regularly due to disability or to family responsibility with elders or young children. Press to have meetings live streamed and recorded as part of an official record. Summarize them for public outlets and encourage those outlets to cover them. Send the information to a network of interested people you know and have a plan for how to raise attention for any problems that come to light. Demand that your local news, radio, tv, digital and print cover those issues that matter to your community. Decide, together with a group of people what should be attended to locally in your own neighborhood, ward, town or city. In Maine, we lost 21 daily and weekly news publications in just the past year. That was half of our local newspapers. It's part of a national trend. Keeping a whole newsroom afloat is expensive without journalists keeping an eye on things you know. Research has shown voter participation goes down, corruption goes up, and divisiveness goes up. If your county is one that has already become a news desert, demand that candidates for city, county and state offices have a plan for how to deal with the lack of information and oversight, you personally can't fix every part of what ails the news. That's going to require a societal shift. But you can support those who are in the trenches right now, and you can demand better from our leaders whose responsibility it is to protect democracy. And that's it.
- [25:56]
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